To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

"You revolutionize an art only by revolutionizing its means. And again: To allow words their original values, without inflating or bronzing or wrapping them in cotton balls, that is the whole secret. (Both quotes from A.H. in his notes to Phantasus, 1898) Or his quasi-mathematical definition of “art”: Kunst = Natur – x.”

(1) He was, according to the great twentieth-century German experimentalist Helmut Heissenbüttel, an artist-of-the-word who drew first from Heine’s materialist aesthetic, then went beyond it into a new aesthetic of the word (Wortkunst). His objective, on the level of language, was “[a] poetry that abandons all musical use of words as an end in itself, that purely formally is carried only by a rhythm vivified by what strives for expression through it.” The shape of his poems on the page is immediately striking – a “middle-axis poetry” (Mittelachsenverse), in which all the lines of a poem are typographicaly centered & resemble on a first viewing the structures of a late twentieth-century poet like Michael McClure or, by a further stretch, the mesostics & centered writings of John Cage. What may be less obvious is that Holz’s invented form became for him, as with McClure & Cage, the vehicle for a new stance-toward-reality – a konsequenter Naturalismus (consistent naturalism) he called it – that underlay & determined his choice of language (demotic) & content (simultaneously quotidian & historically referential). Holz’s own early work, aside from the beginnings of his multi-volume long poem Phantasus (a major breakthrough & the foreshadowing of a new genre), included a book of short prose sketches, Papa Hamlet (with Johannes Schlaf, 1889); the drama Die Familie Selicke (also with Schlaf, 1890); Die Kunst – ihr Wesen und ihre Gesetze [writings on art] (1891); & a theoretical work, Revolution der Lyrik (1899). Increasingly experimental in his later writings (Phatasus would expand to 60,000 lines by 1925 & show a Pound-like ambition to write a “Weltgedicht: a Nuova-Divinia after Dante or Über-Odysee after Homer”), he reemerges today as a still vital linking figure across the nineteenth- & twentieth-century divide.

(2) “Holz not only replaced rhyme with a number of acoustic effects; he also asked ‘why the eye should not have its particular pleasures in the printed type of a poem.’ These pleasures are not miniature images of Man and World, but rather (as if they were calculated on the tachistoscope) ergonomically optimal uses of reading time. Beginning in 1897, Holz typographically centered the lines of his poetry for physiological reading ease. ‘If I left the axis at the beginning of the line, rather than in the middle, the eye would always be forced to travel twice as far.’ What the verses have in view, then, are not readers and their understanding, but eyes and their psychophysics, in other words: ‘Movements of matter, which are not subject to the laws of intelligence and for that reason are much more significant.’ Holz’s Phantasus, rather than addressing fantasy as the surrogate of all senses in the finest romantic manner, reckons with unconscious optokinetics.” (From Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, translated by Michael Metteer)

A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]